Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  “Oh thank God.”

  “We’re short-handed here tonight, so it’s going to be late morning before we can get somebody to bring her up there to you—”

  “I’m on my way. Just tell me how to find you.”

  Tony wanted to come along. Madelyn convinced him to stay with Ethan and see that he got breakfast and lunch. She poured herself a thermos of coffee and emptied everything she could out of her bladder, and before she had the Suburban out of the driveway she felt like she had to go again. Twin Falls was nominally a seven-hour drive, but it was four lanes all the way and she made it in five and three-quarters, and that was with stopping three times to pee and fill the tank and splash cold water on her face. The scenery, had it not been dark, would have been spectacular, with half the trip cutting through the Nez Perce-Clearwater and Payette National Forests. The highway curved between pine-covered mountains that were lighter shadows against the night sky, then fell to rivers roaring with snow melt, climbing again to breathtaking drop-offs where her headlights disappeared into nothingness. She promised herself she would enjoy it on the drive back.

  The day shift had arrived at the police station by the time she got there, and Sgt. Travis was long gone. The duty sergeant told her how a cop had spotted Ava at the Flying J Travel Plaza in Jerome, where the Interstate met the outskirts of Twin Falls. She was wandering from truck to truck and talking to the drivers, an obvious runaway, what with the backpack and the nervous glances over her shoulder. She was currently asleep in her own private cell. “Just show me a picture id, and she’s yours to keep.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I can’t possibly thank you enough.”

  “I got three little girls of my own. I know every square inch of where you’re coming from.”

  Maybe it was a trick of the light, but Madelyn thought, as they brought Ava out, that she saw a flicker of love and gratitude in her daughter’s eyes. Maybe she was kidding herself. Ava’s face was creased from the pillow and she looked so young and helpless that it was all Madelyn could do not to wrap her up in her arms.

  Ava didn’t say anything until they crossed the Snake River on the way to the Interstate. “So what happens now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Am I grounded forever? Are you going to send me to a convent school? Pack me off for psychiatric evaluation?”

  “Oh, sweetheart. No, none of the above.”

  “What are you going to do, then?”

  “We,” she said, “are going to talk.”

  Getting to the crux of it was slow work. In the end, it turned out to be none other than Cole. Why was she not surprised?

  “I want to meet him,” Ava said.

  “And that’s where you were headed?”

  A nod.

  “Where is he?”

  “Guanajuato.”

  “How did you find him?”

  “Gwyn.”

  “Gwyn?”

  “Gwyn Montoya. You know, Alex’s daughter?”

  Madelyn refused to rise to the sarcasm. Eyes on the prize, she told herself. Don’t fight the wrong battles. “How long have you and Gwyn been talking?”

  “A few months.”

  “Have you been in touch with Cole? Did he know you were coming?”

  “No.”

  Well, that was something. She wouldn’t have to kill him, then. “And it’s that important to you? That you would put me through the fear of you being out on the road alone?”

  “If he’s as much of a dick as you think he is, then I won’t want to be around him, so why are you so afraid of me meeting him?”

  “When did I say he was a dick?”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  She’d refilled the thermos with burnt, sour cop coffee and she took a minute to drink some and try to think through her options. Her exhaustion was too complete and the possibilities too numerous, so she went with her instincts. “What if I said yes? That we’ll fly down there and you can meet him and I’ll give you time alone with him and you can judge for yourself?”

  “For real?”

  “Maybe. First of all, I have to be convinced he’s not using heroin. Did you know about that?”

  “Gwyn said, yeah.”

  “I have to finish this semester. And I have to talk it over with Cole.”

  “When’s the last time you talked to him?”

  “You were still in the womb.”

  “Wow.”

  Madelyn saw that it was the proper thing to do, that Ava’s defenses were coming down. Nevertheless. What in God’s name had she just agreed to?

  “Mom, you’re weaving. Pull over and let me drive.”

  Ava, like most of her friends, had been driving since she was 12, first in the open fields outside town, then on back roads, finally in traffic, always with Madelyn there ready to grab the wheel. Now it was Madelyn herself who was the danger. She got off onto the shoulder, then slid across the bench seat while Ava walked around the front of the truck. She had Cole’s features, softened by the lack of a Y chromosome, and Cole’s rangy body; she was not an obvious beauty, but a true and lasting one once she revealed herself. She was fully formed, Madelyn reminded herself. Surely Cole could not do that much harm.

  Ava got in and put the truck in gear. “How about some music?”

  The cassettes in the truck were all Ava’s. Madelyn pulled a plastic case from under the seat and read down the familiar labels: rem, Fine Young Cannibals, Elvis Costello, Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons. She pulled out Doug and the Slugs, an upbeat, witty Canadian band that Ava had discovered somewhere, and fed it into the player as Ava accelerated onto the highway.

  “If I’m going to meet him,” Ava said, “I want the history. All of it.”

  Madelyn took a couple of deep breaths. She made sure her door was locked and settled herself against it. “Do you remember learning about the War of the Roses?”

  “That’s not the history I was—”

  “Patience,” Madelyn said. “York was the white rose and Lancaster was the red…”

  *

  The answering machine was flashing when Alex came in. He’d been at a late after-work dinner with a couple of the younger programmers and he was buzzed from their energy. The message was that his uncle Jesús was dead of a massive heart attack. The family was flying down for the funeral. Did Alex want to come?

  He’d been sleepwalking. He’d let the years pass, agreeably enough, and he’d failed to count the toll. In Alex’s mind, Jesús was the same as when he and Cole and Alex had first played together in his grandparents’ living room. Now he was going to forcibly trade that image for the sight of him in his coffin.

  In Mexico they loved their iconography of the dead, not just on El Día de los Muertos, but all year round, with skeleton figurines everywhere dressed as mariachis or brides and grooms or folkloric dancers. “As you are now, so once was I,” was the repeated message. For Alex the fixation on death itself missed the point. What frightened him was the deterioration of the body, the slowing of the brain, the ever-shrinking list of things worth fighting for, the need for more and more physical comfort. Alex resisted seeing those changes in himself, wanted to believe that he too was the same as he’d been that night, 17 years old, dick constantly hard, sure of his own invulnerability. And Jesús was proof that he was lying to himself.

  After the divorce from Callie, he and Brenda had split up, too. She’d found somebody else while he was not paying attention. Then one night, five years ago, he’d woken up in the uneasy, low-numbered hours, terrified by the thought of the loaded gun in his storage unit, which suddenly seemed like an early warning sign of insanity. The next day he’d sold it at a pawn shop and told Álvaro he would not be doing any more import work. He’d declared the cash as poker winnings over the course of a couple of years, and got rid of the storage shed and the safe.

  He’d turned old and afraid by increments so small that he hadn’t noticed them at the time.

  He called his father. They’d kept an u
neasy peace for a while now. Phone calls every Sunday, dinner at his father’s house once a month or so. No more high-stakes poker. When Gwyn was up from Marfa, she always spent time with her grandparents. Everyone understood what was safe to talk about and what wasn’t.

  “Yes, Papa, I want to come.”

  “Good. Good, I’m glad. I had the agent hold a ticket for you. Why don’t you come over and spend the night here? We have to leave at six in the morning.”

  His next call was to Cole in Guanajuato.

  “Yeah,” Cole said, “I just heard this morning. I saw him a couple of weeks ago and he was in bad shape, but… shit, you know?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Does this mean you’re coming down?”

  “We’ll hit town late morning tomorrow. I’ll call you.”

  When he got to his parents’ house, Alex’s mother greeted him at the door by saying, “We’ve got a surprise.” She sounded like she was trying to talk herself into being pleased. She pointed toward the dining room, where Susan sat with his father. Susan got up to hug him and he said, “Hey, sis. Is what’s his name here?”

  “You know perfectly well that his name is Peter. And no, we’re getting divorced.”

  “This is a new record,” Alex said. “This is the first time you managed to divorce one before I even met him.”

  “It’s only my third,” Susan said, stung. Alex hadn’t seen her in two years. She’d gained weight in Savannah, she was wearing too much makeup, and her hair was sprayed into the kind of helmet that had gone out of style in 1965. Her expensive taupe pants suit was too tight at the armpits and waist, and her perfume mixed unpleasantly with the smoke from the Kool that burned in the ashtray by her chair. Given Alex’s state of mind, it was hard not to see her as death in process.

  Peter was some kind of stockbroker, well enough off that Susan hadn’t had to work for the three years they’d been married. She’d met him at some Savannah retreat that she’d organized during her brief career as an event planner. This had followed her losing her job with the law firm that had discovered that she had not quite finished law school, nor passed the bar, after abandoning her psychology degree, and it was the point at which Alex’s sympathy for her had bottomed out.

  “Susan’s going to stay here until she gets back on her feet,” his father said. If his father’s sympathy was not yet worn out, it was clearly running low.

  “Well, I hope you find something,” Alex said.

  “What, do you think I won’t?” She was defiant, ready to skirmish.

  “No, I’m sure you will. Something you really like, I should have said.” To his father he said, “Jimmy’s not coming?”

  Jimmy was a staff photographer for the Austin Statesman now, and did freelance work on the side. He’d married a courts reporter and he had two kids in elementary school and a nice house in West Lake Hills. He stayed close to his own family and cordially distant from the other Montoyas.

  “No,” his father said. “He’s got assignments all weekend. Graduation parties, weddings, it’s a busy time. And he was never close to Jesús the way you were.”

  “He’s got his own life,” Susan said. “I wish I could say the same.”

  Alex fought off a moment of claustrophobia. Just being under this roof, no matter how much he loved his family, ate away at his identity. Maybe Jimmy knew what he was doing.

  “We’ve got an early start tomorrow,” Alex said. “I’ll see you all in the morning.”

  *

  Alex felt the weight of time again when Octavio wasn’t there to meet them at the León airport. For a few years after his grandparents died, back in ’73, the family had still managed the traditional Christmas trip. But Jesús hadn’t wanted the house, and as Octavio got increasingly infirm and unable to take care of it, the idea of keeping it for the sake of ten days a year began to seem extravagant. They’d sold it in ’78 and given Octavio a pension. Somehow that had been the end of the Christmas trips as well, and Octavio had died soon after. Alex’s father had still flown down on occasion to see Jesús. Alex hadn’t been back since the time he and Callie had run into Álvaro.

  They took a cab from the airport to the Hotel Embajadora in Guanajuato, where the family had booked a suite. They were at the extreme eastern edge of the city, a brisk ten-minute walk from the Jardín de la Unión, surrounded by hills that cupped them like giant hands.

  Alex called Cole from his room and invited him to join them for lunch at the hotel. He washed his face and changed into a guayabera shirt and tried to reset his internal clock to Mexican Optional Time.

  Cole arrived as they were all sitting down at a couple of patio tables. Everybody stood up again to give Cole an abrazo, Susan last of all. Alex saw it happen, right before his eyes. Cole gathered her up and kissed her on the mouth, not a steamy, passionate kiss or anything, but on the lips, and it lasted longer than it should have by half a second, time enough for something in Cole to ignite and something in Susan to yield. You could see it in the way they looked at each other as they slowly pulled apart.

  Uh oh, Alex thought.

  *

  The heart went out of New Orleans when Tina left.

  In hindsight, Cole supposed it was inevitable. She’d carried too many broken people for too long, and when she burned out, her relationship with Cole was collateral damage.

  The last straw was a woman named Jacqui, older, street hardened, who’d brought a gram of coke when she came looking for refuge. When Tina told her to leave, she turned violent and they had to call the cops. Once she was gone, Tina said, “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “I don’t blame you. I’ll just tell the girls when they show up that they have to go somewhere else.”

  “No,” she said, dry-eyed, her words sounding rehearsed. “Not just the orphans. The Five-Four-Four. The drunks. The tourists. The heat. New Orleans.”

  “Me?”

  Her mouth twitched. The smile didn’t make it to her eyes. “You’re great. Some lucky woman is going to snap you up.”

  Cole knew he had contributed to her burden, when his Darkness descended out of nowhere and demanded more meaning from his existence than it could provide, when he needed all his resolve not to take a shot of vodka or something stronger. After four years, it was a bit late to say, “I love you.” Tina had clearly made up her mind. Still, with nothing to lose, he gave it a try.

  “Maybe I love you too,” she said, “but I need to make a break.”

  “How long have you been thinking about this?”

  “A while.”

  “You didn’t want to talk to me?”

  “I couldn’t, sugar. I just couldn’t.”

  Within two weeks she was on a plane to Madison, Wisconsin, where an aunt had agreed to put her up. She was considering nursing school. She gave Cole the address but not the phone number.

  Only after she was gone did he realize how much he’d taken the ease of their daily existence for granted. Their differences, which had seemed profound at the time, now looked trivial. He missed her honeyed voice and the healing touch of her hands. After a few weeks, he’d brought somebody home from the club, a perfectly nice divorcee in her early thirties, and he’d been so sick with post-coital remorse that he’d almost called 911.

  He gave notice at the club and on his apartment and put all his possessions into his little yellow camper-top Toyota pickup, and on his last day in New Orleans he still had not made up his mind where to go. Retreating to Austin felt so much like failure that he was afraid of ending up drunk or on the needle again. He couldn’t afford New York or LA, and San Francisco had been over for 15 years.

  Guanajuato, though. Physically beautiful, with nobody there to ask him where his career had gone. He could teach English on the sly, play guitar for tips, live cheap, plan his next move. On the way out of town, he stopped at a barber shop and got his hair cut as short as it had been in the early commune days, then hit the Mexican Consulate for a visa.

  At the border he explained t
hat he was a music student, there to learn Mexican songs. In Guanajuato, he sold the truck for seed money and rented a decent apartment high up one of the winding callejones above La Alhóndiga, the old fortified granary. He was close to El Mercado, the giant indoor market full of fresh vegetables, and ten minutes from El Jardín de la Unión. The plumbing was new and so were the heavy-duty locks on the doors.

  As much as he hated moving, he hadn’t lost the knack of making himself at home in a new city, of finding the pieces that would fit into a routine. Fresh-squeezed orange juice and hot bread from El Mercado in the morning. A copy of La Jornada, the liberal paper out of the Distrito Federal, which he read while eating his breakfast on a bench by the fountain in El Jardín Reforma across from the market. Back at his apartment, he would write a letter to somebody in the little address book he kept in his wallet, maybe Tupelo Joe or Gordo, Tina, his mother, Sugarfoot, or Susan care of the Montoyas. Some laps around the local fútbol field, taking it easy because he was not yet fully acclimated to the 6,500-foot elevation. A shower and a cheap comida corrida at one of the cafés on Avenida Benito Juárez. Siesta in the heat of the afternoon, then playing guitar in the street at night.

  Alex’s father started arranging him a work permit and said he could set him up with a guy who did construction when his savings ran out.

  In his first week, he went by Jesús’s guitar shop, where he discovered a slender guy in his thirties with big round glasses. He was shaping a neck out of a piece of maple, and he said, “Jesús is retired. I’m his apprentice.” He used the archaic term discípulo, which struck Cole as appropriate. Cole explained who he was and the man introduced himself as Félix Gutiérrez, one of El Maestro’s pupils for the last ten years. “Come upstairs,” Félix said. “He’ll want to see you.”

  Félix closed up the shop and they climbed the steep street to get to the upper story, where Félix knocked and motioned Cole inside. The house was dim and smelled of old cooking oil. Jesús, stretched out in a recliner, dozed in front of a blaring fútbol match on tv. Félix found the remote and turned the tv down, which woke Jesús. Disoriented, he looked from Félix to Cole and said, «Qué pasó?»